Gun control ads have Dems worrying

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s aides met recently with staffers of New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg to warn them: Targeting vulnerable Democrats like Arkansas’s Mark Pryor on gun control could backfire on the party, several sources told POLITICO.

It didn’t work.

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Ads from the Bloomberg-funded Mayors Against Illegal Guns are going up soon in Alaska, Arkansas and North Dakota — three states with Democratic senators who broke with the White House on last month’s background checks vote.

The group is also moving as many as 60 field organizers into about a dozen states where senators — Democrats and Republicans — voted against bill, with the goal of building infrastructure and countering gun rights groups like the National Rifle Association.

It’s all got Democrats nervous about keeping their hold on the Senate, if they are under attack from not only Republicans but pro-gun control forces as well. Gun control legislation gained new national momentum since last December’s shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., that left 20 children and six adults dead, but advocates know they cannot overcome the power of the NRA on Capitol Hill unless those who oppose them pay an electoral price for doing so, and they’ve shown no sign of backing down.

Bloomberg’s group has made its choice: Its radio spots in Arkansas will target the state’s African-American community, “without which Mark Pryor doesn’t have a prayer of getting reelected,” said Mark Glaze, director of Mayors Against Illegal Guns.

Four Senate Democrats — Pryor, Max Baucus of Montana, Mark Begich of Alaska and Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota — joined with Republicans to derail the bill, drawing howls of protest from the gun control movement and complaints from the White House.

But it’s Pryor’s fate that has Democratic leadership most worried.

Senate Democrats point to the example of former Arkansas Democratic Sen. Blanche Lincoln as a warning. Labor unions, angered by Lincoln’s vote against legislation they backed, helped fund a primary challenger in 2010. Lincoln narrowly won that primary, and then was swamped that November by Republican John Boozman.

Democratic senators and aides also note that Pryor has backed President Barack Obama and the leadership on other big issues such as Obamacare, banking reform and taxes, and Reid will need him on upcoming immigration votes.